Soham Patel, The Daughter Industry

 

SAI TELLS A GHOST STORY
(while practicing some version of surya namaskar aka sun salutations) 

 

One morning in late 2010 I looked out my apartment window in Pitts-
burgh where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plate Artist Lofts,
and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of
Friendship. 

I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live
with—we would walk around and routinely meet the people. 

That early morning and only that morning, I thought I saw or I saw out
the window a figure of what seemed to be a like four or five-year-old
brown girl riding a bicycle up Friendship Avenue then fade away. 

How else I know I saw a ghost is the child seemed so composed, happy, and
it was way too early in the morning for someone so young to be out riding
alone.

The latest from Virginia-based British-born poet Soham Patel is The DaughterIndustry (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), a title that follows an array of publications including at least four chapbooks, as well as the full-length collections to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018) and ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize [see my review of these two here], and all one in the end/water— (Delete Press, 2022) [see my review of such here].

Composed as a lyric narrative through seven characters, The Daughter Industry explores how gender, specifically female and non-binary, is approached and reduced, articulating a choral voice in three acts: with short opener to begin, a prose poem set as a rush, a push of dense lyric. As the piece “IN MY DOTTED SUIT AND NO DUPATTA” begins: “On one of the days I found my gender I was in my white dotted orange Punjabi suit sans dupatta I always went sans dupatta because a dean at the arts college told me I had to wear the dupatta always while working and when I asked him why he said to me with smiling eyes in his third language and my first and only fluent one ‘So you always look like a pretty girl!’ [.]” Writing a kind of sequential accumulation, Patel offers a blend of voice and voices, allowing each their own agency, their own space, across an articulation of (as Rajiv Mohabir offers in their back cover quote) “the continued erasure of girls, women, and the nonbinary actors in this seven-part choreopoem,” weaving in and around each other as little bricks of text, all of which combine to form this larger book-length pattern.

Patel cuts a shape of truth, utilizing blocks of text and visual bends as flourish; setting the stage, as one might see this work performed quite easily in a theatrical setting. “one becomes female for the purposes of reproduction,” begins the poem “CLOWNFISH ALL BORN MALE AND THEN THE DOMINANT,” “yellow-bellied water snake gives birth to litters w/out // any men anyway some cardinals like ppl all bright red // fellas and the pale of lady’s gray moods when pesticide // turns common reed frog males into fully functioning fe- // males human baby born→dr. looks for a penis→she // can’t find one the human baby is killed [.]”